In emergency cardio-pulmonary resuscitation mouth-to-mouth respiration is employed to restore cardiac output and pulmonary ventilation following cardiac arrest and apnea. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is a method of artificial ventilation involving an overlap of the patient's mouth with the operator's mouth to inflate the patient's lungs by blowing, followed by an unassisted expiratory phase brought about by elastic recoil of the patient's chest and lungs. Emergency mouth-to-mouth resuscitation requires this procedure to be repeated twelve to sixteen times a minute and therefore exposes a person administering the artificial respiration to disease. Thus, mouth-to-mouth cardio-pulumonary resuscitation which generally is the first emergency aid available to a patient suffering from cardiac arrest exposes the person performing the mouth-to-mouth respiration to high risk of disease and therefore substantially inhibits the willingness of the person to administer such aid. Medical teams called to such emergencies have resuscitator apparatus which force gas, usually oxygen, into the lungs to produce the artificial ventilation; however, such devices are expensive and not generally available.
Mask devices have also been developed which may be placed over the nose and mouth of the patient; this permitted the administrator of the artificial respiration to blow air into the patient's lungs without mouth-to-mouth contact. Such masks, however, cannot be stored in a relatively small space such as a shirt or jacket pocket and thus are inconvenient to carry. Similarly, resuscitation apparatus comprising a ventilator mask and a manually collapsible gas receptacle such as the resuscitator disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,067,487, likewise, cannot be carried easily in a shirt or jacket pocket because of the limitations inherent in the materials used in the construction of the apparatus.